We study a reform that granted European cross-border workers free access to the Swiss labor market and had a stronger effect on regions close to the border. The greater availability of cross-border workers increased foreign employment substantially. Although many cross-border workers were highly...

Using new survey data from Mexico, a dynamic econometric model is estimated to test the effect of policy changes on the flow of migrant labor from rural Mexico to the United States and test for differential effects of policy changes on male and female migration. We find that both IRCA and NAFTA...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. We conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

This paper compares the effects of migration restrictions using licenses which are freely traded in a competitive labor market to those that occur when licenses are allocated to firms who are not permitted to trade them. There is reason to expect that a policy of making licenses non-transferable...

Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...

In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigrant entry by imposing country-specific quotas. We compare local labor markets with more or less exposure to the national quotas due to differences in initial immigrant settlement. A puzzle emerges: the earnings of existing US-born...

This paper studies how changes in deportation fear induced by the roll-out of Secure Communities (SC), a far-reaching immigration enforcement program, affected the demand for safety net programs in the United States. We estimate the spillover effect of SC on the take-up of federal means-tested...

In this paper we analyze the economic effects of different immigration policies using a model that incorporates economic and policy features crucial to understanding the migrant flows into the US. We differentiate among the most relevant channels of immigration to the US: family-based,...

There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies...